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I would add that, even if it was true that those tecniques were used already for a long time, it doesn't mean that we have to be ok with them or that we can't c

by GTP 4y ago

I would add that, even if it was true that those tecniques were used already for a long time, it doesn't mean that we have to be ok with them or that we can't change our mind about them. It would like saying "this minority has always been discriminated, so let's keep discriminating them".

Spivak 4y ago
No it’s saying “people didn’t make a that much of a fuss and the world didn’t end when people started scanning cloud documents and so the same will probably be true of client scanning.” Like I don't like this plan but I also have to be realistic that my reaction as someone who values privacy is way overblown.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  We live in a very different world in 2023 than we lived in back in 2008. For one thing, smartphone adoption has gone from (approximately) zero to well above 90% in most Western nations, and the use of transparent cloud smartphone backup has increased from 0% to nearly 100% of all smartphone users. Private messaging in 2008 meant niche networks like MSN and AOL on desktops. Mobile communication was done mainly by voice. In 2023 desktop messaging and phone calls are fading technologies. Mobile text (typically app-based messaging) is literally how the non-elderly communicate. The way we engage with data is also very different. Back in 2008 I kept most of my photos and private papers in hard-copy form inside my house, or (perhaps) on a local hard drive. Today nearly all of my private papers and photos live in my phone, and for most people a duplicate copy lives on an Apple or Google server somewhere. Having your phone's data stolen is literally a life-altering event for many people, one that is mostly avoided through local data encryption. This is leaving aside the societal implications of ubiquitous scanning, which would effectively undo two centuries of limited policing. This was also a time before massive data breaches and ransomware and revenge porn and data extortion were routine. The big high-profile leaks of celebrity nudes wouldn't happen until 2014. Indeed, the very notion of having cloud-backed smartphone photos stolen was hardly a thing, because cloud backup mostly didn't exist and routine use of phones to take private, explicit imagery was not a thing most people engaged in. In our time, sextortion has become so routine that it's a major category of child abuse. To deal with this changed landscape, security has been massively upgraded across cloud and messaging services. Part of that upgrade is the default use of user-controlled encryption for local data as well as the default use of E2E encryption for most messaging. You can't say "everything was fine" because by and large most things were not fine. From a security perspective things were actually fairly bad! We've made a lot of progress since the time when photo scanning was first launched, including the launching of widespread encryption as a means to prevent breaches. Client-side scanning implies at least weakening some of those measures, and possibly eliminating others.

by GTP 4y ago

Spivak 4y ago

No it’s saying “people didn’t make a that much of a fuss and the world didn’t end when people started scanning cloud documents and so the same will probably be true of client scanning.” Like I don't like this plan but I also have to be realistic that my reaction as someone who values privacy is way overblown.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
We live in a very different world in 2023 than we lived in back in 2008. For one thing, smartphone adoption has gone from (approximately) zero to well above 90% in most Western nations, and the use of transparent cloud smartphone backup has increased from 0% to nearly 100% of all smartphone users. Private messaging in 2008 meant niche networks like MSN and AOL on desktops. Mobile communication was done mainly by voice. In 2023 desktop messaging and phone calls are fading technologies. Mobile text (typically app-based messaging) is literally how the non-elderly communicate. The way we engage with data is also very different. Back in 2008 I kept most of my photos and private papers in hard-copy form inside my house, or (perhaps) on a local hard drive. Today nearly all of my private papers and photos live in my phone, and for most people a duplicate copy lives on an Apple or Google server somewhere. Having your phone's data stolen is literally a life-altering event for many people, one that is mostly avoided through local data encryption. This is leaving aside the societal implications of ubiquitous scanning, which would effectively undo two centuries of limited policing. This was also a time before massive data breaches and ransomware and revenge porn and data extortion were routine. The big high-profile leaks of celebrity nudes wouldn't happen until 2014. Indeed, the very notion of having cloud-backed smartphone photos stolen was hardly a thing, because cloud backup mostly didn't exist and routine use of phones to take private, explicit imagery was not a thing most people engaged in. In our time, sextortion has become so routine that it's a major category of child abuse. To deal with this changed landscape, security has been massively upgraded across cloud and messaging services. Part of that upgrade is the default use of user-controlled encryption for local data as well as the default use of E2E encryption for most messaging. You can't say "everything was fine" because by and large most things were not fine. From a security perspective things were actually fairly bad! We've made a lot of progress since the time when photo scanning was first launched, including the launching of widespread encryption as a means to prevent breaches. Client-side scanning implies at least weakening some of those measures, and possibly eliminating others.